As popular a game as Gorgar was back
in the late 70's and eary 80's, I don't actually remember playing one
back then! Since that was the era that I seemed to live in arcades (in
my early 20s, no responsibilities!) , I must have stumbled over it at
some point.

I bought and restored
this Gorgar as bonus to one of my employees who does remember playing
it. The game now resides outside of Hartford, CT.

This game found me, rather than the
other way around. The fellow that I had purchased one of my Road
Kings from had restored a Gorgar in a similar fashion as I had with my
Road Kings. Buy two junkers and make one whole game out of
them. He didn't have any room to store "left overs" (I'm
starting to accumulate a basement full of them!) so I bought the backbox
(minus any boards, displays, transformer, etc), playfield (minus a bunch
of plastics) and cabinet (minus the coin door) from him. The
playfield was in pretty sad shape, but not beyond restoration. It
was about 80% complete, missing 3 solenoids and a bunch of
switches. Fortunately, the person who removed the parts cut off
the wiring right at the connection, so it didn't require massive
rewiring.

I stripped the playfield and
tossed all of the metal parts into the tumbler to clean them.
The playfield had a good deal of wear around all of the inserts (see
below):

Here is a shot of the same area
after a good cleaning, some touch-up paint and several coats of wax:

I went on an Internet scavenger hunt
for parts and located a coin door, drop target hardware and the missing
plastics. I raided one of the Firepower's that is sitting in my
"to-do" queue and got a transformer and related power supply
parts and the displays and display driver. I had a
"funky" system 6A board that I had removed from a Firepower,
so I rebuilt that board and burned
a new set of ROMs for Gorgar. Another Firepower I had bought at
the Allentown show supposedly didn't have any boards in it, but when I
opened the head to get the transformer out, it had a nice driver board,
so that got thrown into the mix. The only thing missing was a
sound/speech board and I pulled the one from the Blackout I just
bought. Call this the Frankenstein pinball machine!
New rubbers and #47 bulbs all around finished the game up nicely.

The backglass came from
Mayfair. Its not a repro or NOS, but they had one that's between
and 7 and 8 in quality.